by Fiona Harper
Claire tried to reach for the letterbox, but it swung away from her. It took her a split second to realise it was because the door to the downstairs flat was opening.
Oh, heck. No running now.
She closed her eyes momentarily to prepare herself for the awkwardness that was sure to follow and then she stood up straight, opened them again and looked her annoying downstairs neighbour in the face for the very first time.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
You Should Have Told Me
Claire began to laugh nervously, trying to work out how she was going to explain she wasn’t a stalker, even thought she was sneaking around outside his flat in her pyjamas in the dead of night, but then reality seemed to do a sort of weird shift and it wasn’t her downstairs neighbour she was face to face with, but Nick.
For a second elation rushed through her – she’d been waiting to see him for so long – but then everything shifted again, and instead of feeling wonderful, as if it was all part of some lovely dream, it turned into a very different kind of dream altogether. Details began to jar and nothing made sense.
How was he …? When did he …?
And then the puzzle pieces began to fall, slotting themselves into place one by one.
The final piece hit with the force of a ten-ton truck, so powerful that Claire almost thought she was going to fall over. She dropped the envelope she’d forgotten she’d been holding and backed up, some primal instinct propelling her away from him. She kept staring at him, unable to believe what she was seeing, but then something snapped and she turned and ran up the stairs.
She heard a rustle as the rubbish bag he’d been holding hit the floor then his feet thudded on the stairs behind her. ‘Claire! Wait!’
She turned suddenly, just before she got to the top step. She was shaking and she couldn’t stop herself. Her stupid hands were trembling. ‘Just what kind of sick game are you playing?’
‘I’m not!’
She folded her arms tightly across her chest, as if trying to hold herself together. She felt as if her bones would shake themselves apart if she didn’t.
‘I should have known you were too good to be true,’ she said in a whisper that was hard and cold. ‘I should have remembered that every time you peel back the lid on a man, all you find is a selfish bastard who wants to control and manipulate people for his own ends.’
He shook his head, looking so much like a lost little boy that she wanted slap him. ‘No, it wasn’t like that. You’ve got to believe me!’
‘No,’ she said, as she started moving again, wanting to get away from the feeling that her flesh was crawling and she was going to vomit. ‘No, I don’t. I don’t ever have to believe anything you say ever again.’
Then she turned and fled into her flat, slamming her front door behind her.
Chapter Forty
Do Not Disturb
Dominic strained his ears all night listening for Claire, but she was as quiet as she’d ever been up above him. It wasn’t until the next morning, when he was lolling on his sofa, feeling bleary and weary and only just conscious, that he heard a noise from the hallway. He hauled himself up with superhuman effort and ran outside.
She was coming down the stairs, dragging a small wheeled suitcase behind her.
‘Claire!’
She ignored him. Just kept thudding the case down the next step and then the next.
‘I want to explain.’
She banged her case down one more step. ‘Actually, I don’t want to know what twisted little game you’re playing.’
‘I’m not!’
‘Oh, so you haven’t been lying to me all along?’
He opened his mouth and closed it again.
‘Running into you at that party, that was a set-up, wasn’t it? Go on, admit it! You were tricking me the whole time! God! I’m such a fool. I almost fell for it too.’
For a moment another emotion broke through the anger. The look of hurt on her face made something deep inside Dominic’s chest squeeze, but then her features hardened and contorted again.
‘And you were very clever about it,’ she added softly, calmly. If anything, that was even worse than the shouting had been.
Dominic shook his head, tried to tell her that it was pure stupidity and stupidity alone that had got him into this mess, that there hadn’t been anything remotely clever about it, but he seemed to have lost his new-found skill of communicating with a woman he cared about. All that came out was a grunt.
‘You played it just right,’ she continued smoothly, ‘reeling me in with your “I need help being romantic with the girl I’m devoted to” nonsense—’
She stopped. Her eyes widened, and then she let out a laugh so loud and hard it made Dominic flinch.
‘Hah! A girlfriend who didn’t actually exist!’
She brought a hand up to her forehead, massaged her temple, and then she laughed again, but this time it was soft and croaky, barely there. ‘It’s all starting to make sense to me now.’
Dominic finally found his missing voice. ‘No! It wasn’t like that!’
She pulled her case down the final step to the floor, paused for a moment to catch her breath and shot a sideways glance at him. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘At first I still thought it was your grandmother living upstairs. I didn’t know you’d taken over her flat. Neither of you told me!’
Claire’s expression became blank. ‘Well, she wouldn’t have. She died.’
Oh, hell. He should have worked that one out, shouldn’t he? ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘I didn’t know that. I always liked Laurie.’
Claire stared at him hard, as if he was doing something sneaky by being nice to her. He supposed he could understand that. At the same time, he could see her brain working behind her eyes, processing the information. He was thinking of those early notes he’d written her, about hearing aids and cocoa and knitting. It seemed she was too, because after a long pause she said, ‘Well, that certainly explains a lot.’
‘See? I didn’t know the whole time.’
She tipped her chin up. ‘But you knew before me.’
He nodded.
‘When? When did you know? Just now? Yesterday? Last week?’
‘I worked it out at the Hamilton party.’
Her mouth made tiny movements, as if she was trying to form words, and then she just shook her head and headed for the door. She flung it open then paused. ‘Okay,’ she said, hardly able to get the words out she was so angry. ‘You want a chance to explain? Tell me one thing.’
‘Anything.’
A single word left her mouth, ‘Nick?’ She watched very carefully for his reaction. ‘I know that’s not your real name.’
Ah. That. He swallowed.
‘It is ‘Nic’—N I C—short for Dominic. I didn’t realise you had thought it was spelled differently until later. And I didn’t tell you that was my name. You just picked it up from Doug. He’s always called me Nic. Most of my friends do.’
She gave him a look that suggested she was surprised he had any.
‘I didn’t lie to you,’ he said, pulling himself up a little bit straighter. ‘But I also didn’t put you straight.’
‘Why? Why did you do it? Why base it all on lies right from that very first moment? You didn’t have to, you know.’
He nodded. He knew that now. God, how he knew that now. He just was stupid enough not to have known it back then. ‘I worked out who you were when you were telling Doug about the ridiculous gift I’d left you that morning, when you showed him my note.’
A magazine and some cheap flowers? How had he ever thought that appropriate? He astonished himself with his own cluelessness once again.
‘I knew you’d never give me a chance if I told you who I was right at that moment. You’d already made up your mind about who Dominic Arden was, without even meeting me, so I decided to make use of the misunderstanding about my name to buy myself a little time, so you could get to know me before you j
udged me.’
He’d been hoping an explanation might soften her anger a little, but she was standing there, hand on her case, staring at him as if she’d like him to explode on the spot.
He cleared his throat. ‘I know that was wrong now … but I didn’t think it’d go on for so long, get so complicated.’
Her features hardened. ‘If you’d come clean right at the start, I might have found it funny. I might even have realised I’d got you all wrong and given you a second chance.’
He sent her a heartfelt, pleading look. He knew that underneath all her anger, Claire had a generous heart, that she was ready to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
He just needed to convince her he deserved some of that generosity. ‘Could you give me that second chance now?’ he asked softly.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t. I can’t be with a man who lies and manipulates to get what he wants. I can’t be with a coward who pretends to be something he’s not. Even if I could forgive you, there could never be anything between us. You’re simply not good enough for me.’
Dominic had thought he couldn’t feel any worse than he already did, but he’d been wrong. Her words hit him right in the chest, in the heart she’d softened up nicely for him. The sad thing was, he didn’t blame her at all.
Everything got very numb then. It was as if he was on overload and his systems started shutting themselves down one by one. All he could do was blink and try to stop himself feeling as if he might float away. He looked at her smart red case, trying to focus on something solid and real. It was cabin luggage size, stuffed to the brim. ‘You didn’t tell me you had a holiday booked.’
She wrestled her case towards the door and muttered, mostly to herself, ‘I blooming well could do with a holiday.’
He did the gentlemanly thing and opened the door, held it for her so didn’t swing back and send her flying. ‘Where are you going?’
Despite his chivalrous behaviour, she refused to look at him. She pulled the trolley handle on her case all the way up. ‘Away from you.’
‘You can’t move out! Not because of me. Not because of this.’
Claire looked over her shoulder at him as she bumped her case over the threshold and onto the front step. ‘Watch me.’
And then Dominic was left standing on his own in the hallway, wondering if this was what open heart surgery felt like and what on earth he was going to do with all the eggs and avocados and tomatoes he had sitting in his fridge.
Chapter Forty-One
I Didn’t Slip, I Wasn’t Pushed, I Fell
Claire hadn’t had a firm plan about where she was going to go at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. All she’d known was that she wanted to get out of that house, that she couldn’t bear another moment knowing that lying, scheming, rotten Nick was probably less than twenty feet away, no matter where she went in her flat.
No. Not Nick. Dominic.
Slipping up on that just made the rage swirl higher again. How could she have been so stupid? Hadn’t she told herself not to get hoodwinked? Hadn’t she told herself to be careful? How had she missed all those really obvious clues? She couldn’t believe she’d done it all over again.
Well, that was it then. No more men in her life. She obviously couldn’t be trusted to pick the good ones. Otherwise she’d choose someone like Doug, who was sweet and kind, charming and … well … rich. The only other option was to cloister herself away for the rest of her life and stay celibate. Which meant she probably should give up Doris and start crushing on Julie Andrews instead.
She threw her suitcase into the back of her car and then got in and started to drive. It was an irritatingly lovely morning. The clear golden light was dancing through the leaves on the trees that lined the roads and the birds were singing. It was the kind of morning for making love and having long lazy breakfasts that lasted until three. It annoyed her immensely that the faint possibility of those things had now been wiped completely from her horizon.
She stopped and got a cappuccino from a café she didn’t normally go in, but was far enough away from her flat that there was no danger of … him … that man … stumbling into her. Her stomach rolled with shame again.
Oh, she’d thought it was so cute that he’d kept popping up everywhere, like it had been fate or something, and all the time he’d probably been following her like a creepy stalker. She shuddered so hard that some of the foam from her cappuccino slopped onto the tabletop and she had to dab it up with a napkin.
This was good. Thinking things like this about him was good. She had to keep her anger burning bright and hot, because if she let it go out … If she got close to admitting to herself that she’d started to feel something deep for him, something real … Well, that big trapdoor might open up again inside her and she’d fall in and never, ever make it out. So she sat there, sipping her cappuccino and ignoring the gnawing feeling tugging at her insides.
After two hours of driving around North London, wondering if she should get a hotel room, she headed for the only place she could think of that might give her a friendly welcome.
She stood on Peggy’s doorstep, feeling like a stray puppy as she rang the doorbell. Peggy answered, not looking too sleepy, thank goodness, in a kimono and high-heeled fluffy pink slippers.
‘Claire!’ she exclaimed when she saw her standing there, red case at her heels. ‘Jeepers! What happened?’
Claire, who had been ready to launch into a plea for sanctuary, promptly burst into tears. Peggy, bless her, didn’t bat an eyelid, but just wrapped her arms around her friend and held her until the sobbing turned into hiccupping.
‘S-sorry,’ Claire stuttered as she pulled away, trying to mop the worst of her tears up with the ends of her cardigan sleeves. ‘I didn’t mean to do that.’
Peggy gave her another sympathetic squeeze. ‘Looks like you needed to.’
Claire sniffed. ‘And I’m sorry for barging in on you so early on a Sunday morning. It was just …’ she broke off to do a percussive little sob ‘… I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I would have tried Maggs, but she’s in Bournemouth this weekend, visiting her brother.’
Peggy waved her apologies away and shooed her into her flat. Once Claire had been ordered to sit on the leatherette sofa in Peggy’s fifties-themed living room and brought a cup of coffee and a couple of chocolate digestives, Peggy sat down in an armchair and looked steadily at Claire. ‘What on earth happened?’
Claire closed her eyes. She didn’t even know where to start. All sorts of explanations whirled round her head, most of them half finished. In the end, she grabbed hold of the simplest one – the reason why she was here.
‘Can I sleep on your sofa for a couple nights?’
Peggy smiled at her. ‘I can do better than that. My new flatmate – the one I got after Nicole moved out to get married – is away with her boyfriend in Vienna. You can have her room. I’ll send her a text. I’m sure she won’t mind.’
Claire nodded gratefully. ‘Vienna’s lovely this time of year,’ she said, her voice sounding strained and damp.
‘I’m sure it is,’ Peggy said, fixing her with a determined stare, ‘but that’s not the issue here, is it? What’s all this about, Claire? Is something wrong with your flat?’
Claire felt the tide of tears rising again, so she clamped her mouth shut and just nodded. When she felt as if she’d found that balance between letting go enough to be able to talk, but not so much she descended into sobbing, she very carefully let a few words out her mouth. ‘It’s more what’s underneath my flat.’
‘Dry rot?’
Claire shook her head. ‘Worse.’
Peggy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘A sink hole?’
Claire shook her head harder. ‘A no-good, rotten, lying scumbag of a man.’
Peggy nodded. ‘Know the breed,’ she muttered then sank back into her armchair. ‘But I thought you were seeing Nick. Is he the scumbag? And what’s that got to do with your flat?’
Claire launched int
o the whole story, starting with the day she’d fallen over that stupid bike in the hallway and ended up with marching out on … that man … this morning. ‘So Maggs was right,’ she said, as she came to the end. ‘There was certainly a lot more to my downstairs neighbour than I ever imagined!’
Peggy just stared at her, shaking her head in amazement. ‘Flipping heck,’ she said. ‘It’s like you’ve got your own little Doris alternative universe going on!’
Of all the things Peggy could have said, Claire had not been expecting her to say that. She leaned forward in her chair and stared at her. ‘What?’
Peggy just gave her a you-can’t-mess-with-fate kind of look. ‘Your life … It’s turned into the plot of Pillow Talk.’
Claire, despite her recent crying jag, began to laugh softly. She’d obviously crossed over from despair to hysteria, the way people did at funerals, when everything had got too much and the only way to cope was to go a little crazy. ‘No it isn’t! I haven’t got a party line and I’d definitely know if that rat had a piano in his flat and was singing to women all day long!’
‘Not the exact plot!’ Peggy said, slightly exasperated, as if Claire should know that instinctively. ‘The mistaken identity – him sussing you out before you’d realised it was him. Then there’s the emails and texts, the twenty-first century version of all those intimate pyjama-clad phone calls. The fact he’s been trying to charm you, but digging himself in even deeper.’
‘Trying to charm himself into my knickers, don’t forget!’
Peggy winked at her as she swung her legs round to drape them over the arm of her chair and dunked her digestive in her coffee. ‘Would that be such a bad thing? He is pretty hot!’
Claire suddenly wished with a passion Maggs had been home this weekend.